She is not alone in the shop. A gentleman is leaning on the counter, watching the busy white hands very intently, and apparently deeply interested in the progress of the cough-mixture. This gentleman is her brother’s old friend, “Daredevil Dick.”
Richard Marwood has been a great deal at the surgery since the night on which he first set foot in his old haunts; he has brought his mother over, and introduced that lady to Miss Darley. Mrs. Marwood was delighted with Isabella’s frank manners and handsome face, and insisted on carrying her back to dine in Spring Gardens. Quite a sociable little dinner they had too, Richard being — for a man who had been condemned for a murder, and had escaped from a lunatic asylum — very cheerful indeed. The young man told Isabella all his adventures, till that young lady alternately laughed and cried — thereby affording Richard’s fond mother most convincing proof of the goodness of her heart — and was altogether so very brilliant and amusing, that when at eleven o’clock Gus came round from a very critical case (viz., a quarrel of the Cheerfuls as to whether Gustavus Ponsonby, novelist and satirist, magazine-writer and poet, deserved the trouncing he had received in the “Friday Pillory”) to take Bell home in a cab, the little trio simultaneously declared that the evening had gone as if by magic! As if by magic! What if to two out of those three the evening did really go by magic? there is a certain pink-legged little gentleman, with wings, and a bandage round his eyes, who, some people say, is as great a magician in his way as Albertus Magnus or Doctor Dee, and who has done as much mischief and worked as much ruin in his own manner as all the villanous saltpetre ever dug out of the bosom of the peaceful, corn-growing, flower-bearing earth. That gentleman, I have no doubt, presided on the occasion.
Thus the acquaintance of Richard and Isabella had ripened into something very much like friendship; and here he is, watching her employed in the rather unromantic business of making up a cough-mixture for an elderly washerwoman of methodistical persuasions. But it is one of the fancies of the pink-legged gentleman aforesaid to lend his bandage to his victims; and there is nothing that John, William, George, Henry, James, or Alfred can do, in which Jane, Eliza, Susan, or Sarah will not see a dignity and a charm, or vice versâ. Pshaw! It is not Mokannah who wears the silver veil; it is we who are in love with Mokannah who put on the glittering, blinding medium; and, looking at that gentleman through the dazzle and the glitter, insist on thinking him a very handsome man, till some one takes the veil off our eyes, and we straightway fall to and abuse poor Mokannah, because he is not what we chose to fancy him. It is very hard upon poor tobacco-smoking, beer-imbibing, card-playing, latch-key-loving Tom Jones, that Sophia will insist on elevating him into a god, and then being angry with him because he is Tom Jones and fond of bitter ale and bird’s-eye. But come what may, the pink-legged gentleman must have his diversion, and no doubt his eyes twinkle merrily behind that bandage of his, to see the fools this wise world of ours is made up of.
“You could trust me, Isabella, then,” said Richard; “you could trust me, in spite of all — in spite of my wasted youth and the blight upon my name?”
“Do we not all trust you, Mr. Marwood, with our entire hearts?” answered the young lady, taking shelter undercover of a very wide generality.
“Not ‘Mr. Marwood,’ Bell; it sounds very cold from the lips of my old friend’s sister. Every one calls me Richard, and I, without once asking permission, have called you Bell. Call me Richard, Bell, if you trust me.”
She looks him in the face, and is silent for a moment; her heart beats a great deal faster — so fast that her lips can scarcely shape the words she speaks.
“I do trust you, Richard; I believe your heart to be goodness and truth itself.”
“Is it worth having, then, Bell? I wouldn’t ask on that question if I had not a hope now — ay, and not such a feeble one either — to see my name cleared from the stain that rests upon it. If there is any truth in my heart, Isabella, that truth is yours alone. Can you trust me, as the woman who loves trusts through life and till death, under every shadow and through every cloud?”
I don’t know whether essence of peppermint, tincture of myrrh, and hair-oil, are the proper ingredients in a cough-mixture; but I know that Isabella poured them into the glass measure very liberally.
“You do not answer me, Isabella. Ah, you cannot trust the branded criminal — the escaped lunatic — the man the world calls a murderer!”
“Not trust you, Richard?” Only four words, and only one glance from the gray eyes into the brown, and so much told! So much more than I could tell in a dozen chapters, told in those four words and that one look!
Gus opens the half-glass door at this very moment. “Are you coming to tea?” he asks; “here’s Sarah Jane up to her eyes in grease and muffins.”
“Yes, Gus, dear old friend,” said Richard, laying his hand on Darley’s shoulder; “we’re coming in to tea immediately, brother!”
Gus looked at him with a glance of considerable astonishment, shook him heartily by the hand, and gave a long whistle; after which he walked up to the counter and examined the cough-mixture.
“Oh!” he said, “I suppose that’s why you’ve put enough laudanum into this to poison a small regiment, eh, Bell? Perhaps we may as well throw it out of the window; for if it goes out of the door I shall be hung for wholesale murder.”
They were a very merry party over the little tea-table; and if nobody ate any of the muffins, which Mr. Cordonner called “embodied indigestions,” they laughed a great deal, and talked still more — so much so, that Percy declared his reasoning faculties to be quite overpowered, and wanted to be distinctly informed whether it was Richard who was going to marry Gus, or Gus about to unite himself to the juvenile domestic, or he himself who was to be married against his inclination — which, seeing he was of a yielding and peace-loving disposition, was not so unlikely — or, in short, to uses own expressive language, “what the row was all about?”
Nobody, however, took the trouble to set Mr. P. C.’s doubts at rest, and he drank his tea with perfect contentment, but without sugar, and in a dense intellectual fog. “It doesn’t matter,” he murmured; “perhaps Richard will turn again and be Lord Mayor of London town, and then my children will read his adventures in a future Pinnock, and they may understand it. It’s a great thing to be a child, and to understand those sort of things. When I was six years old I knew who William Rufus married, and how many people died in the Plague of London. I can’t say it made me any happier or better, but I dare say it was a great advantage.”
At this moment the bell hung at the shop-door (a noisy preventive of petty larceny, giving the alarm if any juvenile delinquent had a desire to abstract a bottle of castor-oil, or a camomile-pill or so, for his peculiar benefit) rang violently, and our old friend Mr. Peters burst into the shop, and through the shop into the parlour, in a state of such excitement that his very fingers seemed out of breath.
“Back again?” cried Richard, starting up with surprise; for be it known to the reader that Mr. Peters had only the day before started for Slopperton-on-the-Slosh to hunt up evidence about this man, whose very image lay buried outside that town.
Before the fingers of Mr. Peters, which quite shook with excitement, could shape an answer to Richard’s exclamation of surprise, a very dignified elderly gentleman, whose appearance was almost clerical, followed the detective into the room, and bowed politely to the assembled party.
“I will take upon myself to be my own sponsor,” said that gentleman. “If, as I believe, I am speaking to Mr. Marwood,” he added, looking at Richard, who bowed affirmatively, “it is to the interest of both of us — of you, sir, more especially — that we should become acquainted. I am Dr. Tappenden, of Slopperton.”
Mr. Cordonner, having politely withdrawn himself from the group so as not to interfere with any confidential communication, was here imprudent enough to attempt to select a book from the young surgeon’s hanging-library, and, in endeavouring to take down the third volume of
Bragelonne, brought down, as usual, the entire literary shower-bath on his devoted head, and sat quietly snowed up, as it were, in loose leaves of Michel Lévy’s shilling edition, and fragments of illustrations by Tony Johannot.
Richard looked a little puzzled at Dr. Tappenden’s introduction; but Mr. Peters threw in upon his fingers this piece of information,—”He knows him!” and Richard was immediately interested.
“We are all friends here, I believe?” said the schoolmaster, glancing round interrogatively.
“Oh, decidedly, Monsieur d’ Artagnan,” replied Percy, absently looking up from one of the loose leaves he had selected for perusal from those scattered around him.
“Monsieur d’Artagnan! Your friend is pleased to be facetious,” said the Doctor, with some indignation.
“Oh, pray excuse him, sir. He is only absent-minded,” replied Richard. “My friend Peters informs me that you know this man — this singular, this incomprehensible villain, whose supposed death is so extraordinary.”
“He — either the man who died, or this man who is now occupying a high position in London — was for some years in my employ; but in spite of what our worthy friend the detective says, I am inclined to think that Jabez North, my tutor, did actually die, and that it was his body which I saw at the police station.”
“Not a bit of it, sir,” said the detective on his rapid fingers, “not a bit of it! That death was a do — a do, out and out. It was too systematic to be anything else, and I was a fool not to see there was something black at the bottom of it at the time. People don’t go and lay themselves out high and dry upon a heath, with clean soles to their shoes, on a stormy night, and the bottle in their hand — not took hold of, neither, but lying loose, you understand; put there — not clutched as a dying man clutches what his hand closes upon. I say this ain’t how people make away with themselves when they can’t stand life any longer. It was a do — a plant, such as very few but that man could be capable of; and that man’s your tutor, and the death was meant to put a stop to all suspicion; and while you was a-sighin’ and a-groanin’ over that poor young innocent, Mr. Jabez North was a-cuttin’ a fine figure, and a-captivatin’ a furrin heiress, with your money, or your banker’s money, as had to bear the loss of them forged cheques.”
“But the likeness?” said Dr. Tappenden. “That dead man was the very image of Jabez North.”
“Very likely, sir. There’s mysterious goin’s on, and some coincidences in this life, as well as in your story-books that’s lent out at three half-pence a volume, keep ’em tree days and return ’em clean.”
“Well,” continued the schoolmaster, “the moment I see this man I shall know whether he is indeed the person we want to find. If he should be the man who was my usher, I can prove a circumstance which will go a great way, Mr. Marwood, towards fixing your uncle’s murder upon him.”
“And that is — ?” asked Richard, eagerly.
But there is no occasion for the reader to know what it is just yet; so we will leave the little party in the Friar Street surgery to talk this business over, which they do with such intense interest that the small hours catch them still talking of the same subject, and Mr. Percy Cordonner still snowed up in his corner, reading from the loose leaves the most fascinating olla podrida of literature, wherein the writings of Charles Dickens, George Sand, Harrison Ainsworth, and Alexandre Dumas are blended together in the most delicious and exciting confusion.
CHAPTER IX. CAPTAIN LANSDOWN OVERHEARS A CONVERSATION WHICH APPEARS TO INTEREST HIM.
LAURENT BLUROSSET was a sort of rage at the West-end of London. What did they seek, these weary denizens of the West-end, but excitement? Excitement! No matter how obtained. If Laurent Blurosset were a magician, so much the better; if he had sold himself to the devil, so much the better again, and so much the more exciting. There was something almost approaching to a sensation in making a morning call upon a gentleman who had possibly entered into a contract with Sathanas, or put his name on the tack of a bit of stamped paper payable at sight to Lucifer himself. And then there was the slightest chance, the faintest shadow of a probability, of meeting the proprietor of the gentleman they called upon; and what could be more delightful than that? How did he visit Marlborough Street — the proprietor? Had he a pass-key to the hall door? or did he leave his card with the servant, like any other of the gentlemen his pupils and allies? Or did he rise through a trap in the Brussels carpet in the drawingroom? or slide through one of the sham Wouvermanns that adorned the walls? At any rate, a visit to the mysterious chemist of Marlborough Street was about the best thing to do at this fag-end of the worn-out London season; and Monsieur Laurent Blurosset was considered a great deal better than the Opera.
It was growing dusk on the evening on which there was so much excitement in the little surgery in Friar Street, when a plain close carriage stopped at Monsieur Blurosset’s door, and a lady alighted thickly veiled. The graceful but haughty head is one we know. It is Valerie, who, in the depth of her misery, comes to this man, who is in part the author of that misery.
She is ushered into a small apartment at the back of the house, half study, half laboratory, littered with books, manuscripts, crucibles, and mathematical instruments. On a little table, near a fire that burns low in the grate, are thrown in a careless heap the well-remembered cards — the cards which eight years ago foretold the death of the king of spades.
The room is empty when she enters it, and she seats herself in the depth of the shadow; for there is no light but the flickering flame of the low fire.
What does she think of, as she sits in the gloom of that silent apartment? Who shall say? What forest deep, what lonely ocean strand, what desert island, is more dismal than the backroom of a London house, at the window of which looks in a high black wall, or a dreary, smoke-dried, weird, vegetable phenomenon which nobody on earth but the landlord ever called a tree?
What does she think of in this dreary room? What can she think of? What has she ever thought for eight years past but of the man she loved and murdered? And he was innocent! As long as she had been convinced of his guilt, of his cruel and bitter treachery, it had been a sacrifice, that ordeal of the November night. Now it took another colour; it was a murder — and she a pitiful puppet in the hands of a master-fiend!
Monsieur Blurosset enters the room, and finds her alone with these thoughts.
“Madame,” he says, “I have perhaps the honour of knowing you?” He has so many fair visitors that he thinks this one, whose face he cannot see, may be one of his old clients.
“It is eight years since you have seen me, monsieur,” she replies. “You have most likely forgotten me?”
“Forgotten you, madame, perhaps, but not your voice. That is not to be forgotten.”
“Indeed, monsieur — and why not?”
“Because, madame, it has a peculiarity of its own, which, as a physiologist, I cannot mistake. It is the voice of one who has suffered?”
“It is! — it is!”
“Of one who has suffered more than it is the common lot of woman to suffer.”
“You are right, monsieur.”
“And now, madame, what can I do for you?”
“Nothing, monsieur. You can do nothing for me but that which the commonest apothecary in this city who will sell me an ounce of laudanum can do as well as you.”
“Oh, has it come to that again?” he says, with a shade of sarcasm in his tone. “I remember, eight years ago—”
“I asked you for the means of death. I did not say I wished to die then, at that moment. I did not. I had a purpose in life. I have still.”
As she said these words the fellow-lodger of Blurosset — the Indian soldier, Captain Lansdown, who had let himself in with his latch-key — crossed the hall, and was arrested at the half-open door of the study by the sound of voices within. I don’t know how to account for conduct so unworthy of an officer and a gentleman, but the captain stopped in the shadow of the dark hall and listened — as if lif
e and death were on the words — to the voice of the speaker.
“I have, I say, still a purpose in life — a solemn and a sacred one — to protect the innocent. However guilty I may be, thank Heaven I have still the power to protect my son.”
“You are married, madame?”
“I am married. You know it as well as I, Monsieur Laurent Blurosset. The man who first brought me to your apartment must have been, if not your accomplice, at least your colleague. He revealed to you his scheme, no doubt, in order to secure your assistance in that scheme. I am married to a villain — such a villain as I think Heaven never before looked down upon.”
“And you would protect your son, madame, from his father?”
Captain Lansdown’s face gleams through the shadow as white as the face of Valerie herself, as she stands looking full at Monsieur Blurosset in the flickering fire-light.
“And you would protect your son from his father, madame?” repeats the chemist.
“The man to whom I am at present married is not the father of my son,” says Valerie, in a cold calm voice.
“How, madame?”
“I was married before,” she continued. “The son I so dearly love is the son of my first husband. My second marriage has been a marriage only in name. All your worthy colleague, Monsieur Raymond Marolles, stained his hands in innocent blood to obtain was a large fortune. He has that, and is content; but he shall not hold it long.”
“And your purpose in coming to me, madame — ?”
“Is to accuse you — yes, Monsieur Laurent Blurosset, to accuse you — as an accomplice in the murder of Gaston de Lancy.”
“An accomplice in a murder!”
“Yes; you sold me a poison — you knew for what that poison was to be used; you were in the plot, the vile and demoniac plot, that was to steep my soul in guilt. You prophesied the death of the man I was intended to murder; you put the thought into my distracted brain — the weapon into my guilty hand; and while I suffer all the tortures which Heaven inflicts on those who break its laws, are you to go free? No, monsieur, you shall not go free. Either join with me in accusing this man, and help me to drag him to justice, or by the light in the sky, by the life-blood of my broken heart — by the life of my only child, I swear to denounce you! Gaston de Lancy shall not go unavenged by the woman who loved and murdered him.”
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 33